Experimental geo-located Augmented Reality installation
No.34 Tree: Placing a natural and largely ignored feature into the realms of a human construct, ‘Addressing Nature’ implies ownership or at least occupancy by others. The tree is addressed and with a digital doorbell, you can enter through the portal to peak inside. Kincentric sanctuary is what you will find inside.
‘Addressing Nature’wraps around the notions of connectedness and by default this piece mines human behaviour placing a spotlight on John Dewey’s concept of ‘experience’ by focussing on the transaction between subject and worlds.
The theme grew out an emerging anthropocentric habit to put nature elsewhere: how we occupy and divide up our space creating visiting rights for the public to safely access nature in a managed environment, to cleanse and pave over. This behaviour is a recognisable feature of the Anthropocene.
The chosen site in a mill complex in Halifax is one of 34 trees planted in a biophilic attempt to soften the urban landscape. The site was chosen to provide a high footfall man-made area for the first of the works in the ‘Kincentric Sanctuary’ series entitled ‘Addressing Nature’.
No.34 Tree, is now recognised as a place on Google maps. It is home to a vast number of species from lichen to birds and sits amongst the paving surrounded by seating and regularly frequented if not largely ignored by hungry workers and smokers. Revealing other-than-human occupancy became the starting point for making whilst simultaneously toying with Shklovsky’s strategy of defamiliarisation as a tool to amplify the concept. To destabilise our perception of reality; cause the viewer to question their perception of reality and, as a result, ultimately redefine that reality would become one of the featured aims of this work. Shklovsky notes that ‘art exists to make one feel things…to make objects “unfamiliar” … to increase the difficulty and length of perception.’ What I am asking of the viewer is for them to feel and perceive the tree differently, to unhide what is largely ignored – to stop and become aware. To achieve this No. 34 Tree has been given an address, placing a natural and largely ignored feature into the realms of a human construct, ‘Addressing Nature’ implies ownership or at least occupancy by others.
Figure 8 No.34 Tree in Dean Clough Courtyard flagged by a ‘SOLD’ sign. C.Bowe, (2022) The Sold sign as a ‘Digital Doorbell to open a portal to the world of No.34 tree.
The act of addressing the tree extends its identity into a habituated construct largely accepted in the western world and in doing so, we might question its right to co-inhabit ‘our’ space. We can safely say that our habituated awareness of these others is lacking although some do accept the fact that in and on No. 34 Tree there are, as Donna Haraway describes, ‘kin’
Donna Harraway’s thoughts surrounding the Anthropocene are ever present in the process of making lifting me out of the detail of my work to check in on the overarching aims:
“Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.” Haraway, D. (2016).
Rebuilding connections and settling fears makes room for hope. Without hope we are dis-empowered to make change and without change we cannot ‘make thin’ the Anthropocene and re imagine the next epoch.
“The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge” Haraway, D. (2016).
‘Settling troubled waters, disrupting patterns of behaviour and in doing so, making thin the Anthropocene’, reminds me of Haraway’s rejection of a doomsday rhetoric. By learning to ‘stay with the trouble’ we must accept and live on a damaged Earth, and to find the ways to live with that and means to build a more connected future.
By bringing together organic form and digital representation through a synaesthetic experience I hope to enliven the mind with a sanctuary of kin. Attached to the No. 34 Tree with a digital doorbell, Kincentric Sanctuary is a home we can connect with. The audience as visitor is offered a peek inside to make further connections to the non-human others in the scene.
The Sanctuary is home. It is nature and it is experience.